P.54 - Archive of Dr. Israel Kasztner, one of the leaders of the Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest, and Collection of Dov Dinur, Kasztner's Biographer

P.54 - Archive of Dr. Israel Kasztner, one of the leaders of the Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest, and Collection of Dov Dinur, Kasztner's biographer
 
 Biography of Dr. Israel Rezső Rudolf Kasztner:
 
 Israel Kasztner was born in Cluj, Transylvania, Romania in 1906. Between World War I and World War II, he worked as a journalist and an attorney at law, and, at the same time, he was an activist in the Zionist Labor Movement in Cluj.
 After the annexation of northern Transylvania to Hungary in 1940, Kasztner moved to Budapest and continued his Zionist Movement activities. He was one of the founders of the underground Relief and Rescue Committee which was established in 1942 to help the Jewish refugees. From 1943 he served as deputy to Ottó Komoly, the Chairman of the Zionist Federation in Hungary.
 
 After the occupation of Hungary by the German Army, 19 March 1944, contacts were made between the Relief and Rescue Committee and SS officers, primarily with Adolf Eichmann, with the purpose of rescuing Jews from deportation to annihilation camps. Dr. Kasztner conducted the deliberations with the SS men on behalf of the Committee, and after great effort, on 30 June 1944, a train departed from Budapest, with 1,684 Jews aboard it. The passengers on the train included Jews who had arrived from various ghettos in Hungary, refugees from Slovakia and Poland who had made their way to Hungary and Zionist Movement activists. The train arrived at a special camp within the Bergen-Belsen camp; from this camp, the members of the group travelled to Switzerland, arriving there by late 1944.
 
 In addition to this group of Jews, Kasztner and his associates on the Committee were able to transfer approximately 20,000 Jews from the ghettos, before they could be deported to Strasshof, to the Vienna area and Vienna itself, where they were put to work at forced labor, and almost all of these Jews survived.
 
 After the war, Kasztner made aliya to Eretz Israel.
 In 1954, Malkiel Gruenwald submitted a claim against Israel Kasztner on the charge of treason and responsibility for the deaths of many Jews. The final verdict handed down by the Supreme Court exonerated Kasztner from the accusations against him, with the exception of the testimony which he had given on behalf of Kurt Becher.
 Ten months earlier, in March 1957, at the height of the Supreme Court deliberations, Kasztner was murdered.
 Kasztner's personality and his activities have been incorporated into books and plays and he continues to be a controversial figure.
 
 History of the Collection:
 Yad Vashem received the Archive of Dr. Israel Kasztner and the Archive of Dr. Dov Dinur, the historian, from Zsuzsi Kasztner (Dr. Kasztner's daughter), Merav Michaeli (Dr. Kasztner's granddaughter), Dr. Yitzchak Katzir (a relative of Dr. Kasztner) and the historian, Dov Dinur, who published a biography of Dr. Israel Kasztner in 1987.
 
 Scope of the Collection and its Content:
 
 In the Collection there are 4,500 pages of original documentation, mostly regarding the following subjects:
 
 A. The history of the Jews of Hungary during the Holocaust;
 
 B. Efforts of the Relief and Rescue Committee in Hungary in whose framework Dr. Israel Kasztner was active, 1942-1944;
 
 C. The role of the Jewish institutions that were active in the Free World countries working to rescue Jews;
 
 D. Documentation regarding the Nuremberg Trial at which Dr. Kasztner testified on behalf of Kurt Becher;
 
 E. Documentation regarding the Kasztner Affair in Israel, 1952-1958;
 
 F. Documentation regarding the Dr. Kasztner Rezső Emlékét Megörökítő Bizottság (Commission to Perpetrate the Memory of Dr. Rezső Kasztner;
 
 G. Documentation gathered by Dov Dinur, the historian, in preparation for the writing of a book about Dr. Israel Kasztner.
 
 In the Collection are important documents, such as:
 
 - Drafts of the Kasztner Report regarding the activities of the Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest, 1942-1945, prepared by Dr. Israel Kasztner after World War II, and a Hebrew translation of the report;
 
 - Report regarding the activities of Saly Mayer in Budapest, 1944, related to the rescue of Jews, prepared by the Joint Distribution Committee, 04 October 1945, including corrections and notes made by Dr. Israel Kasztner on the report;
 
 - List of Jews who departed from Budapest for Bergen-Belsen, summer 1944;
 
 - Letter from Oskar Schindler in Regensburg to Dr. Israel Kasztner in Geneva, mainly regarding Schindler's rescue activities in Krakow, 18 April 1947.
 
 Selected Bibliography:
 - Dinur, Dov, "Kasztner: New Discoveries of the Man and His Work”, Haifa, 1987;
 
 - Weitz, Yehiam, "The Man Who Was Murdered Twice: The Life, the Trial and the Death of Dr. Israel Kasztner", Jerusalem 1995;
 
 - Aronson, Shlomo, “Israel Kasztner: Rescuer in Nazi-Occupied Europe, Prosecutor at Nuremberg, and Accused at Home,” in "The Holocaust: The Unique and Universal", Almog, Shmuel, ed., Jerusalem, 2001, pp. 1–47; 
 
 - http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Kasztner_Rezso - written by Kinga Frojimovics and Yechiam Weitz.